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Also I am not a saber-toothed tiger or an ogre or a Wizard.
I am a saber-toothed ogretroll wombat Wizard SO THERE.
I will understand everything when I am Grown-Up. A Grown-Up is a Person Taller Than Me.
The phonograph is off-limits.
Father’s office is off-limits.
The cabinets are off-limits, even though there is candy inside.
If something is good, it is off-limits.
I am to Do What I Am Told.
There is no such thing as magic.
Some things are alive and some things aren’t but it is hard to tell right away sometimes.
Boys wear trousers and girls wear dresses and I am not allowed to wear a dress even though trousers itch and do not come in very many colors.
In the Nation of Learmont Arms Apartments (Apt. #7), children are taken away from their parents at the age of six and sent to a castle on a hill and this is called the Kingdom of School and if I cry any more about it I shall have no supper.
Thomas’s hand trembled a little over the last law. He looked out his darkened window, where a moon as big as the one on Inspector Balloon’s cover looked down, examining him with its huge white detective’s glass.
And so it came to be that only a little while after taking Inspector Balloon into his confidence, Thomas Rood stood at the iron gates of a wily, dark, enchanted country. He stood bravely, armored to the teeth: On his feet he wore the great and powerful Golden Galoshes; upon his head the Long-Tailed Cap, stitched with protective sigils of polar bears and kangaroos to watch over him with foot and tooth. He sheathed his hands in the rare and precious Carnivorous Mittens, striped like a tiger’s paws, complete with black wool claws. He donned his Troll’s Mantle about his shoulders: one of his father’s old beaten leather jackets that was far too big for little Thomas, hanging as long and billowy as a nightgown. Beneath it, the formidable Houndstooth Suit, which would, if he needed it, tear and bite at his enemies. For weapons he had his baseball and the Magic Pencil, the very one given to him by his own mother so long ago, nestled in the hoary depths of the Secretive Satchel.
Thomas had made himself ready, though his heart quailed within him. He longed to be in his home country—far-off and far-flung!—by his old hearthside with a bowl of soup and a song. The pleasures of home, which he had once disdained, now seemed the sweetest of all possible things. But they were lost to him now. Now was he an exile, a lonely creature on the borders of a foreign and perilous realm.
All around him, folk streamed in through the twisted gate. Giants with pockmarked faces, shrieking maidens with shining hair, and many not so different from him, weeping and gnashing their teeth and covering their faces with their own pitiful, clawless, non-carnivorous mittens. Thomas felt sorry for them. We are all of us poor exiles, he thought, though like many of his thoughts, he did not know why he should think of such an odd thing, or be so comfortable calling himself an exile, or even quite where he had learned that word. I will protect you if I can.
Thomas had done all he could to prepare himself to enter the barbarian city. He could only hope it was enough. He looked up, through the whipping winds of Autumn and the wild
cascade of blood-dark leaves spiraling through his vision. He read what had been writ—by what fell and ancient hand?—upon the gate.
PUBLIC SCHOOL 348
“You’ll like school, darling,” Gwendolyn said sweetly, tucking the tail of his polar-bear-and-kangaroo hat into his coat.
“Shan’t, though,” sniffed Thomas.
“There’ll be lots of other nice children there, and a desk all your very own, and things to draw with and books to read. And Mrs. Wilkinson is a wonderful teacher. You’ll come home all bright-eyed and full of stories.”
“Shan’t,” Thomas repeated. His eyes darkened and his eyebrows waggled. He leaned forward and clenched his fists, and this was Thomas Rood’s traditional posture when he meant to deliver a Something Awfully. Gwendolyn had started calling his little tirades Something Awfullies—for it was always Something Awfully Important, or Something Awfully Funny, or Something Awfully Nice, or Something Awfully Wicked that he absolutely must tell her right now. Thomas never said anything plainly or patiently.
But Gwendolyn knew the signs. She pulled up her son’s scarf over his mouth before he could get a breath up under the hundred balloons of his thoughts and bundled him off to that dreadful castle on a hill that grew windows and chimneys and doors the way a briar grows roses.
The boy took a shaky, freezing breath, clenched his fists, safe inside the Carnivorous Mittens, and stepped inside.
The Realm of 348 was divided, Thomas quickly observed, into several smaller districts. His new home was to be in the Underclassmen’s Wing, Classroom 4. A thick carpet decorated with a pattern of tiny red flowers covered the ground beneath his feet. Thomas hunched down on his heels, scowling at them. Light as bright and harsh as white paint splashed over everything—the flowers, a herd of slick brown skinny-legged desks grazing in their petals, the shoulders of his coat, the heads of Other Children milling about in small packs. Crushed pencils and crayons and barrettes and hairpins and buttons and pennies and doll eyeballs and bits of someone’s ancient lunch crunched underfoot. Pictures of letters and numbers hung on every wall like portraits of their ancestors. A papier-mâché model of the solar system spun, wrinkled and wired and garish, in one corner of the classroom.
Thomas did, indeed, have a desk of his own. He was introduced to it by Mrs. Wilkinson, who had curly hair and wore a necklace of little jade stones. Thomas knew they were jade; he knew the names of all the gemstones just the way I know the names of all my cousins. He looked down at his wooden desk and chair, the slick, brown, skinny-legged creature in the field of red flowers. It had scuffs on the wood and gum underneath it and some time ago someone had carved HUMPHREY! into the bottom-left corner with little lightning bolts around it.
“Hullo, Desk,” said Thomas softly. He was charmed to meet it. If something is all your own, you ought to treat it well, like a horse or a dog, and pet it and feed it and take it for walks. Or at least look after it better than Humphrey had. “How old are you, Desk? Have you seen many battles? What do you dream about at night when all the children have gone? Do you ever wish you were something other than a desk? What is your favorite thing to have written on you?”
“Mrs. Wilkinson! Tommy R’s talking to his desk!” wailed one of the Others. Thomas was frightened of the Others. The Other Children his father was always wishing he could be. Normal Children. Nice Children. Other Children. This particular Other Child was a boy with yellow hair and glasses and a pen stain on his cheek. He was much bigger than Thomas. His voice wore a sneer like a cap with a feather in it. Thomas had seen him crying into his mother’s skirt outside the school. The Other Children giggled nervously, staring at him while Pen-Stain pointed urgently.
“Mrs. Wilkinson! I heard him! He was talking to his desk! You ought to punish him!”
